One thing that every blogger fears is people who steal their content. People who take it from an RSS feed are one thing, but those bloggers out there who actively copy and paste content and use it as their own are an annoying bunch of people.

Today, I was browsing John Chow’s blog when I read this comment:

In the meantime, I am just using some of the best free route to get traffic and make money. Work very well so far!

I suddenly felt an urge to see how he was getting decent traffic, so I clicked through to Warrior Blog. The first thing I noticed was this post (post deleted by author), which looked very similar to this post on Cash Quests. As it turned out, the posts are almost identical, right down to the misspelling of “discuss”.

From Warrior Blog:

For me, becoming involved in the myLot world was never about being “paid to disuss” or becoming part of a community. It was all about recruiting Warrior Blog readers!

The simple logic was:

• Warrior Blog is about making money online.
• myLot users want to make money online.
• myLot users who post in the “make money online” category really want to make money online.
• Dropping links to Warrior Blog on myLot will result in valuable, targeted visitors.

From Cash Quests:

For me, becoming involved in the myLot world was never about being “paid to disuss” or becoming part of a community. It was all about recruiting Cash Quests readers!

The simple logic was:

• Cash Quests is about making money online.
• myLot users want to make money online.
• myLot users who post in the “make money online” category really want to make money online.
• Dropping links to Cash Quests on myLot will result in valuable, targeted visitors coming to Cash Quests.

At first I couldn’t believe somebody would do this. This guy also ripped off (post deleted by author) another Kumiko post and even used her images! Other posts Sean, the 18-year-old author of Warrior blog, has taken credit for include a number simply ripped from article websites and credited as his own work. These articles have drawn considerable praise in his comments.

The icing on the cake for me with Warrior Blog is that the author has ripped off my own blog contest, pretty much copying my content and making it into his own contest. How hard is it to write about your own contest? Sean is just plain lazy. He has added a few of his own extras into the contest, but by and large, what he’s written is identical to what I wrote – the prizes are even identical. Check out his Angel-imitation contest here (post deleted by author), and check out my original win-$100 contest here. I’m a bit pissed with this guy because a lot of other blogs are directing traffic to Warrior Blog on the basis that it’s a decent read.

Using other bloggers’ material to inspire your own work is a fundamental part of blogging, but there are certain lines that no blogger should cross. If you quote somebody, you must source that quote. If you are using other people’s material, you are obliged to say so. If you don’t, then when somebody comes to your blog and discovers what you’ve been doing, your reputation will be irreparably damaged. This goes for using articles from places like Ezine Article too; you must disclose what you are using.

I’m not one for damaging reputations, so I’m offering Sean an invitation here to come and explain himself and tell us why he has plagiarized content on his blog.

The blogging community needs to work together to stop content theft. The great irony here is that Kumiko wrote about ways to avoid content theft just last week.

Tags: Around the web by Angel
9 Comments »

It’s discouraging to see so many dead blogs online. When I started this blog I had a quick scout around for other blogs in the same make-money-blogging type of niche. There were lots of them, but as this is something I’ve been writing about on other blogs (dragging those blogs off topic) I wanted to put some time into learning how to make money online and then put that knowledge into use on other blogs.

Now when I revisit those same blogs that I went to little over a month ago, I find that the authors have just given up. Why would you put so much time and effort into starting a blog only to give up a few months later? Here’s a handful of blogs that are dead in the water:

www.iblog-youblog.com/ - last updated August 2
www.seotoast.com/ - July 17
fundszine.com/ - July 25
www.erikvossman.com/ - July 28
www.thecashblog.com/ - August 15

After preaching to the world about how to make money online or how to blog, these people all gave up. Looking at reasons why bloggers give up, here are my ways to combat them:

Not making any money

This one must be the single biggest reason why people just give up on their blogs. Confident of being the next John Chows or Pro Bloggers, people get sucked in by the big lights and expect the world to come to them. That’s not how it works. You have to work your ass off to get the world to come to you. And you can’t expect to make money right away. You know what I do? I rarely check my Adsense account and minimally monitor how much money I’m making. Every now and then something turns up in my Paypal account, but for the most part I’m working on other elements of my blogging first; the money will come later.

No traffic

You can write the best posts in the world, but if you haven’t got any readers then you may as well talk to yourself. When you start blogging, there’s no need to religiously monitor Google analytics. Put your time and effort into writing content and learning. Analyzing your stats won’t help you unless you have a sold foundation to blog on.

No ideas

There may come a point when you simply have nothing left to say and you feel like you can’t do anything else to make your blog better. There are a few ways you can avoid this situation:

1. Write down an idea for a blog post as soon as you have it, no matter where you are.
2. Work on improving your blog’s design, removing unnecessary clutter, cleaning your template.
3. Read other blogs, learn something, digest it, use it, blog it.
4. Revisit older posts, analyze how your opinions or methods have changed and then write about it.
5. Check Google News for interesting topics to blog about.
6. Blog about what you have achieved, what you are proud of, what you are still yet to achieve and what you are aiming for.

No time

This is the one that gets me most often. There is no way hell I could ever find the time to be a full-time blogger, and nor would I want to, so I have to work this around my working and social lives. I’ve gradually found this easier to do by blogging at about the same time daily, at night when I get home and I have no other engagements. At the weekend I usually blog on Saturday afternoon after work and then in the evening on Sunday.

I wrote before that I didn’t keep a blogging schedule, but I’ve found that to do this seriously, some sort of routine is necessary for discipline. I try and write multiple posts and then use the “Post timestamp” feature on Wordpress so I can schedule my blog posts. One post a day is enough for now.

Leaving a blog unattended is one surefire way to drive people away. Even if you’re only gone for a few days readers will be wary of lengthy gaps in between posts because of the number of people who simply leave their blogs to die.

Don’t give up!

Tags: Tips and tricks by Angel
5 Comments »

Recently I’ve been turning down money from blogging – lots of money. I’ve been exploring the whole text link phenomenon for the blogs I author and I did a bit of digging on the Digital Point forums. What I came across wasn’t surprising really, but it’s left me wondering if I’ve made the right decisions.

In case you aren’t aware, there are tons of people who will buy links on your blogs for sizeable sums. The most I have ever sold a link for is $140 for a six months placement. That’s not bad going for something you don’t have to do any work for. What’s even better is that advertisers will pay you straight up by Paypal. Within 15 minutes of contacting an advertiser you can have money in your Paypal account.

Typically, a text link on an average blog (say, Page Rank 4), will go for about $70. There’s no point in accepting anything less than this if you have a decent blog. One thing I’ve found is that once you have an established blog, people will contact you. When that happens, it’s like money falling out of the sky. For this to happen though, your blog needs to be a few things:

Respected: People must be seen to value your opinions.

Established: You need to have been around for a while.

Popular : Advertisers normally only look at what Page Rank a blog has. That’s generally all they’re interested in. Once you have a decent blog, you can create an advertising page and show off you unique hits, page views, Page Rank and RSS subscribers. Alexa rank isn’t as important.

To make the most money possible though, you need to go after advertisers. This can be as simple as reading the most popular blogs in your niche, looking at who advertises on those blogs and then contacting the advertisers yourself.

Then there’s the sort of advertisers I’ve found on Digital Point recently. They will throw money at anybody with a decent Page Rank. Between you and me, I’ve turned down hundreds of dollars over the past couple of weeks. You want to know why? Because the links people want to buy are often totally irrelevant, usually related to cigarettes or gambling.

If you are selling text links that are relevant to your sites content then you have a lot more you can get away with than if you’re selling links that are going to stick out like a sore thumb. Multiple irrelevant text links are bad because they mean that Google can penalize you and you thus lose your link power, which effectively makes your Page Rank worthless to advertisers.

There is also some talk on forums that linking out to gambling, casino and cigarette websites will negatively impact your blog. The amount of money that these websites are trying to throw at bloggers suggests that most bloggers are turning them down. It’s tempting to accept a few llinks, throw them up on a blog and pocket close to $1,000, but this isn’t a long-term solution. If I was going to give up blogging tomorrow then I’d do this and let my blogs rot, but as it is, accepting irrelevant text links is like blog suicide. And if something is frowned upon by Google then it is often best not to rock the boat.

Tags: Text links by Angel
3 Comments »